The comedian appeared at the Book Festival for a reading from his new novel...
David Baddiel was in town yesterday - but avoided the riff-raff of the Fringe for the more rarefied atmosphere of the international book festival.
He was there to read from his new, third novel The Secret Purposes, set in the internment camps set up on the Isle Of Man during the war to hold Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. It's loosely based on the experiences of his own grandfather, but is resolutely not a funny book.
Not that that concerned him unduly. "I have quite a lot of confidence in myself as a writer," he told the audience.
And he said the process of writing a serious historical novel was not as far removed from comedy as you might think.
"Comedy is a serious business," he said. "It's hard to write and has a lot of big, important things to say it its best. The comic and the serious are closely interlinked."
The extract he read concerned a genuine Ministry of Information memo which said that the treatment of the Jewish people at the hands of Nazi Germany should not be used in the propaganda machine, because Britons might not consider Jews innocent victims.
Asked whether he worried about the response to a comedian tackling such a serious topic, he said: "I long ago stopped worrying about they way things might be perceived you just can't do that. I write what I feel I want to write. The fact it might contradict people's perceptions of me didn't really bother me."
